Welcome

Never Smooth Jass – Just Hella Bumpy

BURNT SUGAR THE ARKESTRA CHAMBER is a territory band, a neo-tribal thang, a community hang, a society music guild aspiring to the condition of all that is molten, glacial, racial, spacial, oceanic, mythic, antiphonal and telepathic.

“A multiracial jam army that freestyles with cool telekinesis between the lustrous menace of Miles Davis’ On The Corner, the slash-and-om of 1970s King Crimson, and Jimi Hendrix’ moonwalk across side three of Electric Ladyland.”– David Fricke, Rolling Stone.

All our love to Chaka Khan, Nina Simone, George Clinton and the P-funk All Stars, Lady Day, Miles Davis, Eddy Hazel, A.R. Kane, Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, Duke Ellington and Betty Davis for opening the gates of paradise and pushing us through.

Butch Morris’s Conduction System for Orchestral Improvisation is the preferred mode of channeling for this Gotham based ensemble of pan-ethnic sound warriors. Everyone of them is a border crossing trans-national whether they’ll admit it or not.

Spontaneous combustion being an occupational hazard in Gotham, Burnt Sugar is how we keep it real, surreal, arboreal, aquatic, incendiary. If only because we might be mistaken for the world’s second fully improvisational acid-funk band.

To quote Arthur Jafa, we don’t strive to be original, but Aboriginal. Like the songlines and the dreaming, like Tracey Moffatt and The Last Wave, like Cubase and Cabrini Green. One foot in the prehistoric, the other in the post human. In this journey, you’re the journal and we’re the journalists. Houston, Houston, do you read?
~Greg Tate

Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber celebrates two decades of “never playing anything the same way once.” Founder (and acclaimed writer and cultural critic) Greg Tate and Business Manager ( and original member and electric bassist) Jared Michael Nickerson offer their thoughts on “20 Years of Avant Groiddnuss.” Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber always gives tribute Read on ☞

Join Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber in an avant-celebration of two decades of “never playing anything the same way once.” As always, the collective pays tribute to its sonic sensei, the Maestro Lawrence Butch Morris (1947–2013), for showing its members THE WAY of Conducted Improvisation. Over the course of 18 albums, Burnt Sugar has covered Read on ☞

The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” exhibit shines a light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, Read on ☞